Page 31 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
I let her have it for longer than I should, because the way she moves undoes me and the undoing feels like something I've been starving for.
Then I pull her off the wall, carry her across the room, and put her back against the table. The map crumples under her spine. The water pitcher hits the floor. Her breath punches out of her, and before she can reclaim the rhythm I've got her hip in one hand and the edge of the table in the other, and I drive into her at an angle that makes her back arch and her hands scramble for purchase and her mouth open on a sound that is not strategy.
"Wall," she manages, her voice wrecked and furious. "I said wall."
"You requested. I overruled."
She bites my shoulder. I growl against her throat. The sounds filling the room are animal and raw and belong to the wolves underneath the people, and neither of us is pretending anymore.
Her nails rake down my back, and the sting of broken skin sends a rush of territorial fury through my body that translates directly into force. I drive into her harder, deeper, and she takes it and demands more, her voice reduced to sounds that carry the omega harmonic in every breath, and the harmonic is doing something to my biology that I can feel in the base of my spine, a tightening that builds toward a pressure I don't recognize, something my body is reaching for that it doesn't yet have the biology to complete. The reaching catches me for a fleeting moment then the incompleteness drives me forward.
My hand finds her hip, gripping hard enough to leave prints, and my other hand is braced on the table beside her, and the muscles in my forearms are corded and burning and I don't care.
She's close. I can feel it in the way her body tightens around me, the rhythmic clenching that pulls me deeper, and in the way her breathing fragments into sharp, broken sounds that she's given up trying to control.
"Don't stop." Her teeth are against my jaw, the words more vibration than voice. "Don't you dare stop."
I don't stop. I bury myself in her and grind my hips against the spot that makes her breath catch. Her back arches off the table. Her hands lock in my hair. She comes with her teeth in my shoulder and a cry that she'll deny making if I ever bring it up, and her body clamps around me so hard that my vision whites out. My wolf roars. My body follows hers over the edge with a force that empties my lungs and drops my forehead against her shoulder while my body pulses inside hers.
The silence that follows is not tender.
Her breathing is ragged against my neck. My arms are burning from the effort of holding myself above her on the table, and the possessive part of my brain is screaming at me to stay, to cover her body with mine, to press my face into her throat and breathe until her scent is the only thing left in my lungs.
I pull out. I step back. The distance between our bodies fills immediately with air that smells like both of us, our scents merged and thick and carrying the evidence of what just happened. It will take hours for the room to clear.
Revna sits up on the table. She steadies herself with one hand on the edge for a single breath, then straightens and reaches for her clothes. Her hands are steady. Her face is blank. The flush on her throat and the redness on her wrists where my grip held too long are the only evidence, and she's already covering both.
She pulls the tunic over her head, smooths her hair, and reassembles the composure she wears like armor. The reassembly is fast, practiced, and absolutely ruthless. By the time she turns to face me, the woman who was underneath me is gone and the strategist is back in full.
"This doesn't happen again," she says.
"No."
"The terms haven't changed."
"The terms haven't changed."
She walks to the door. She doesn't look back. The door closes between us, and I stand in my quarters with her scent on my skin and her taste in my mouth and the welts from her nails burning across my back, and the fury that fills the space she left behind is aimed at myself, at the biology that just overrode every principle I've spent my career building, and at the specific, infuriating certainty that she was right about every word she said before I kissed her.
I pick my clothes off the floor. The bite mark on my shoulder is already darkening, and the sting of it pulses in time with my heartbeat, and my wolf presses toward the wall between our rooms with a focus that the sex did nothing to diminish.
I stay in my quarters. The whetstone stays on the table. Her scent stays on my skin, and the silence between our rooms fills the rest of the day, and neither of us breaks it.
11
REVNA
The wall is warm when I press my hand against it. His fire on the other side, feeding through the shared chimney into both rooms, the heat carried through stone the way everything about Torben Eriksson carries through barriers that should be thick enough to stop it.
I've been awake for an hour. The silence that settled between our rooms yesterday has held through the night and into the grey light of dawn, unbroken by his voice or mine, and the quiet has the specific weight of two people choosing not to speak rather than having nothing to say.
Through the stone I can hear him moving. The creak of floorboards. The scrape of a chair. The small, efficient sounds of a man starting his day with the same discipline he applies to everything else. He's been awake longer than I have. I'm certain of that the way I'm certain of the patrol rotations and the guard shifts, because I've spent the time close to him cataloging his patterns through this wall and the information is lodged in my body now, involuntary as breathing.
I pull my hand off the stone and sit on the edge of the pallet. My quarters are the same as they were yesterday. The basin, the window with its mocking view of the mountain, the door that hasbeen unlocked for days now, a boundary he removed without explanation or discussion.
I haven't spoken through the wall. Haven't knocked on his door. The silence between our rooms is the one boundary neither of us has dismantled, and this morning I'm content to let it hold.
The inventory of what happened between us is easier to manage. The bruise on my hip has darkened overnight into something vivid and specific, tender when the waistband of my trousers presses against it. The muscles in my thighs carry a deep soreness that maps to positions and force and the particular intensity of a confrontation that turned into something neither of us planned. The reddened patch along my collarbone where his teeth dragged without quite breaking skin has faded to a faint pink, but I can still feel the ghost pressure of his mouth there when I touch it.
